Fix, Don't Raise The Gas Tax

Unwilling to let Americans reap the long overdue benefits of lower gasoline prices, liberals are attempting to snooker conservatives into supporting an increase in the federal gasoline tax. If, as liberals argue, the gasoline tax is merely a “fee” for road use that must periodically increase to keep pace with the rising costs of road construction, maintenance, and repair, then a prerequisite to hiking the gasoline tax should be ensuring gasoline tax revenues are spent on roads rather than big-government boondoggles. Unfortunately, this prerequisite is not being met.

Liberals have long loved high gasoline taxes. Big taxes fund big government. Moreover, high gasoline taxes punish oil companies, which liberals oddly demonize rather than praise for producing the least expensive and most useful form of transportation fuel, which in turn enables American mobility.

Higher gasoline taxes are unnecessary to build and maintain roads.

Liberals also love expanding the Nanny State to outlaw or punish things simply because liberals don’t like them. Liberals hate SUVs and the suburban, family-centered lifestyle they represent. Artificially high gasoline prices punish SUV owners in a direct and specialized manner. Liberals attempt to build public support for this assault on suburban lifestyles by saying we need to reduce oil consumption. But why, precisely, should one American feel compelled to suppress another American’s oil consumption? If an oil company wishes to sell an extra gallon of gasoline and an American citizen is quite happy to buy that extra gallon of gasoline, why in the name of Nosy Nelly should anybody else care or – worse – seek to outlaw or punish that voluntary transaction?

High gasoline prices are also the darling of environmental activist groups. Environmental activist groups claim America is the prime boogeyman in an asserted (but still nonexistent) global warming crisis. Sending gasoline prices through the roof, environmental activist groups argue, will make it very difficult for Americans to drive much, which will in turn lower our carbon dioxide emissions.

In lockstep with its liberal and environmental activist base, the Obama administration has openly sought to push American gasoline prices through the roof. “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Obama’s first-term energy secretary, Steven Chu, told the Wall Street Journal in 2008. At the time, European gasoline prices averaged approximately $8 per gallon.

A few years ago, liberals argued high gasoline prices were precisely the reason why government should hike gasoline taxes. Hiking gasoline taxes, liberals argued, would induce a market shift from perennially expensive gasoline to alternative energy sources. Now, liberals argue low gasoline prices are precisely the reason why government should hike gasoline taxes. Inexpensive gasoline means people can afford to give more gasoline tax money to government, liberals argue. And what about all those welcome cost savings motorists have enjoyed in recent months? Well, that money is best served going to government rather than private individuals, liberals argue.

Surprisingly, a few prominent conservatives appear to have let themselves be snookered by the liberals’ new logic for their eternal demands for higher taxes. Liberals have taken to calling the gasoline tax nothing more than a user fee for roads built and maintained by government. When road construction and maintenance costs rise, gasoline taxes must correspondingly rise to pay for the roads on which automobiles drive, liberals argue.

The problem with the user fee argument is government redirects substantial amounts of the gasoline tax to government projects that have nothing to do with road construction and maintenance. As pointed out by Zack Slingsby of the Heritage Foundation, the federal government diverts 17 percent of federal gas tax revenues to mass transit programs via the federal Highway Trust Fund. This is the case, as Slingsby points out, “even though [mass transit’s] share of the nation’s surface travel amounted to roughly 1 percent and users pay nothing into the [Highway Trust fund].” Worse, as Slingsby notes, the mass transit recipients of federal gasoline tax dollars are concentrated in just six cities – New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This is not in keeping with the argument that federal gasoline taxes merely reflect the cost of government building and maintaining roads in Peoria, Wichita, Nashville, Albuquerque, and everywhere else people drive.

If more federal tax dollars are truly needed to keep up with rising road construction and maintenance costs, then plenty of available federal gasoline tax dollars are already being paid by motorists but diverted to mass transit boondoggles. Rather than parroting liberal cries for higher taxes, conservatives should ensure that “road user fees” are actually spent on roads rather than subsidies for expensive and poor-returning mass transit boondoggles in a few deep-blue cities.